Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet by Michelle R. Warren (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet by Michelle R. Warren Gennifer Dorgan Michelle R. Warren, Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), xiii + 342 pp. Much of today’s scholarship on medieval manuscripts relies exclusively on work with digitized objects—though how much is impossible to know, since authors rarely acknowledge differences between formats of the book they are studying. This is a significant oversight, as Michelle R. Warren’s Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet lays bare. We have come to take for granted that “forms effect meaning,” as Donald F. McKenzie wrote (quoted by Warren, 28), but the significance of a book’s multiplication of forms over the internet is not merely interpretive. Texts’ long histories in manuscript, print, and digital forms are inseparable from many other histories, including those of nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism. Treating the medieval manuscript as a “hybrid book-form” including its digital parts enables the acknowledgement of these histories in the name of both academic ethics and methodological rigor (31). Combining expertise in textual scholarship and digital humanities, Warren demonstrates how to undertake this multimedia approach to manuscript studies through a case study of Cambridge, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, MS 80, the titular “medieval book on the internet.” Each of the six chapters tells a different history of MS 80, which contains a Middle English Grail narrative written by Henry Lovelich in the early fifteenth century. Chapter 1, “Translating Arthur: Books, Texts, Machines,” deals with the translation of Arthurian stories from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Lovelich to internet folklorists. Though these authors often obscure their works’ relationships to other texts, every instance of intertextual transfer shapes meaning, a point of which we should be especially aware in an age when governments are researching “fully automatic high-quality translation” (FAHQT) for military purposes (76). FAHQT is one of many elusive technological goals that has been called a “grail”: a mystification that Warren tells us is frequently used to teach users of the internet “not to ask too many questions about machines or their makers” (12). The role of the Grail myth in forming stratified communities is further explored in the next two chapters. In “Performing Community: Merchants, Chivalry, Data,” Warren traces the relationship of MS 80 to the interests of the London Skinner’s Guild, of which Lovelich was a member. The Guild benefitted from social transformations taking place in the fifteenth century, including access to privilege through wealth as well as lineage. Accordingly, Lovelich’s narrative emphasizes social hierarchies while presenting Arthur as a “people’s king” (90). In producing books like MS 80, the Skinner’s Guild aimed to consolidate its own prestige. In the centuries since, many readers have registered their [End Page 267] responses to Lovelich’s work in the form of annotations, which are the focus of chapter 3, “Marking Manuscripts: Makers, Users, Coders.” Handwritten annotations in the manuscript demonstrate early modern readers’ interest in MS 80 as a source of historical facts. These annotations are easily accessible to readers of the digitized manuscript on Parker Library on the Web 2.0. However, digital annotations, such as notes in the code of the now-archived Parker 1.0, tend to get lost when data is moved between platforms. Such annotations are also part of MS 80’s ongoing history, Warren reminds us. Like annotations, catalogues and editions reveal how readers have reacted to a book over time. Such texts about texts also play an active role in shaping narratives of literary history. In the fourth chapter, “Cataloguing Libraries: History, Romance, Website,” Warren details how cataloguers of MS 80 have shifted the text’s genre between history and romance and brought its author’s identity in and out of focus. This phenomenon, which continues into the digital era, affects how readers can access a book using tools such as an index or a keyword search. Just as nineteenth-century catalogues exhibit considerable influence on digital platforms, so too do nineteenth-century editions, as chapter 5, “Editing Romance: Poetry, Print, Platform,” details. Scans of Frederick J. Furnivall’s 1861 Early English Text Society edition of...